When the reality of Kenya battling COVID-19 sank in March, the country’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) joined other nations’ spy agencies in securing surgical masks, testing kits, ventilators among others.
The process of acquiring these items was “dirty, tactical and covert” but NIS managed to get 100 ventilators going by a report by Parliament’s Health Committee led by Murang’a Woman Representative Sabina Chege.
At the time, the rush to procure COVID-19 supplies was informed by scarcity and it took with for the spy agencies in different countries to outbid each other.
“The committee observed that Kemsa received a consignment of Covid-19 Health Products and Technologies (HPTs) from the National Intelligence Service. This included 100 ventilators. However, it is unclear how the NIS obtained and acquired this consignment,” reads a draft report by the Health Committee according to Daily Nation.
The National Assembly Health Committee was investigating how billions were lost through the Kenya Medical Supplies Agency (Kemsa) which had the sole mandate to supply COVID-19 items across the country.
However, the committee did not establish how NIS managed to procure the 100 ventilators.
This was the same story for Isareli’s Mosssad, a top intelligence agency in the world. It seems NIS benchmarked with it in its quest to bring in the 100 ventilators.
For Mossad, it was a covert and complex operation which saw it lose and win; outdo other spies and be outdone too.
A highly ranked Mossad officer told The Times of Israel that “I have overseen many operations in my life and I’ve never dealt with such a complex operation.”
“The world is selling [ventilators] through cracks. We need to find the cracks,” the officer only identified as Het told 12’s “Uvda” investigative news program.
With the underhand tactics, Mossad flew in a 100,000 COVID-19 test kits, 25,000 N95 respiratory masks and 10 million surgical masks all from unknown countries.
Nonetheless, with these big numbers, it was still below projection and in some instances, lost the bid unceremoniously.
We had a country in Europe where our trucks arrived at the factory’s doors but another European country was ahead of us and loaded it up,” Het recollected.
“We also had a situation where we had equipment we purchased on a plane but it had to be unloaded because the plane didn’t get permission [to take off] due to the embargo,” Het disclosed.